With the advent of hay balers making bales weighing over 1,000 pounds each, rather than the previously common bale size of 50 to 150 pounds, a need was created for equipment to handle these larger bales. These large bales are normally of a cylindrical configuration, and are formed by first forming a windrow, and then rolling up and packing the windrow into a large bale.
While there are many distinct advantages of having a few large bales rather than a multitude of smaller bales, there are certain problems involved in handling and using the larger bales. For example, whereas a smaller bale could be placed by hand on a truck or trailer for transportation to a feeding site, the larger bales are simply too heavy and bulky for such manual handling. Likewise, the smaller bales could normally be broken open or unrolled easily by hand and therefore easily fed to livestock, such as cattle. Conversely, the larger bales are quite difficult to feed to livestock by hand.
The larger bales can be lifted and transported on fork lift types of devices on the front or the back of a tractor such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,999,608. U.S. Pat. No. 3,779,208 is an example of a prior art device which is capable of transporting large bales and unrolling these bales along the ground.
It has therefore been shown that there is an existing need for a device for engaging, lifting, transporting and feeding or unwinding bales of material such as large round bales of hay, and especially needed is a device which performs all of these functions without the necessity of the operator having to dismount the tractor to perform portions of the needed process. Another serious problem when using these large bales is the one of how to move the bale from one side of a fence to the other without damaging the fence. In other words, there is a need to be able to have a tractor on one side of a fence or enclosure and to be able to unroll or feed the hay in the bale into another enclosure or across a fence or to simply move a large bale from one side of a fence to another without the necessity of driving the bale transporting device through a gate to the other side of the fence. While the small bales of hay could be thrown into a feed bunk and then broken open, or thrown over a fence and then broken open or unrolled manually, this simply is not possible, or at least is not practical to do with bales which weigh as much as 1,200 pounds.